That awakening in the early dawn into the modern world of distant enemies and secret deadly missiles was unforgettable. Some one showed me a steel arrow which had been dropped within the arsenal, a small, sharpened, nail-like thing that would transfix a body from head to feet. These arrows are dumped over by the thousands to fall where they will. That little machine a mile and more aloft in the sky, busily buzzing its way across the heavens, is the true symbol of war today, not face to face except on rare occasions, but hellish in its impersonal will to destroy. * * * * * A wonderful day dawned on Venice after the departure of the hostile aeroplanes, a day among days, and all the Venetians were abroad. The attack which brought home the actual dangers to them did not seem to dull their lively spirits. They were busy in the quaint aquatic manner of Venice. The little shops were full of people, the boatmen reviled one another in the narrow canals as they squeezed past, the _vaporetti_ and the motor-boats snorted up and down the Grand Canal. Venice seemingly had accepted her liability to night attack as a new condition of her peculiar life. There were more soldiers than ever moving in the narrow, winding footpaths, the restaurants were full of officers in fresh uniforms. On the water-front beyond the Salute there was much movement among the destroyers. One of these gray seabirds went out at midnight, when war was declared, and took a small Austrian station on the Adriatic. They brought back some prisoners and booty which seemed to interest the Venetians more than the hostile aeroplanes. Yet with all this warlike activity it was hard to realize the fact of war in Italy, to remember that just over the low line of the Lido the hostile fleets were looking for each other in the Adriatic, that a few miles to the north the attack had begun all along the twisting frontier, that the first caravan of the wounded had started for Padua. As I floated that afternoon over the lagoons past the Giudecca, and the blue Euganean Hills rose out of the gray mist that seems ever to hang on the Venetian horizon, it was impossible to believe in the fact, to realize that all this human beauty around me, the slow accumulation of the ages of the finest work of man, was in danger of eternal destruction. Venice rose from the green sea water like the city of enchantment that Turner so often painted. Venice was never so lovely, so wholly the palace of enchantment as she was then, stripped of all the tourist triviality and vulgarity that she usually endures at this season. It was Venice left to her ancient self in this hour of her danger. She was like a marvelous, fragile, still beautiful great lady, so delicate that the least violence might kill her! In this dying light of the day she was already something unearthly, on the extreme marge of our modern world....